4/10/2008 @ 6:00PM

Ecotopia

After six years in the city, Shira Golding and Ari Moore want to try something new. The two 27-year-old artists came to New York after college, but now yearn for less urban and more affordable living. Rather than retreat to suburbia, the two are trying to recruit like-minded souls to join them in an artistic, vegan commune, which they plan to form in upstate New York.

“The number of people doesn’t matter so much as shared values,” says Golding, who then elaborates on a philosophy of animal rights, ecological sustainability and “freeganism,” in which “you abstain from capitalism by getting things for free or [by] barter[ing].”

Golding and Moore’s utopian vision is in its infancy, but they aren’t alone in their desire to build their own self-reliant community. The academics and organizations who track “intentional communities” today–a tricky task, given that some don’t want to be found–say the U.S. and other Western countries have been experiencing a wave of community-forming since the mid 1990s. Saving the planet has replaced godly fervor and free love as the driving emotional force.

“The two groups growing dramatically now in America are ecovillages, which are usually rural or semi-rural, and cohousing, which tends to be in or near cities,” says Bill Metcalf, a sociologist at Griffith University in Australia who studies communalism and has lived in two intentional communities.

Most of these new groups are communal to varying degrees–some ecovillages pool everything they own and earn, while so-called “cohousing dwellers” typically have private homes and incomes while sharing some spaces, resources and domestic tasks. In addition to the desire to live green, community dwellers want more connection with the people around them–and not the digital kind.

“Part of the motivation is that we have a very strongly increased sense of alienation in the country than we did a generation ago,” said Laird Schaub, founder and resident of Sandhill Farm in Missouri.

The closest thing the communal movement has to a monitoring body is the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), which publishes an annual directory. It listed 900 North American intentional communities in 2007, up from 350 in 1992. Those communities come in every ideological stripe, from vegan anti-capitalist to fundamentalist Christian, but the majority stress environmental conservation as part of their mission.

The FIC estimates that around 100,000 Americans live in intentional communities–a tiny fraction of the population, compared with, say, the 2.5% of Israelis who live on agricultural collectives known as kibbutzim. But many American communards hope to have an outsize impact on society.

“The whole reason we started this place was to be a living laboratory example,” says Liz Walker, who co-founded the EcoVillage at Ithaca, in New York State, in 1991, and remains its executive director. EVI has 160 members living in 60 homes that take up less than 10% of the 175-acre compound, with the rest left to frogs, heron, deer and two organic farms.

Shared common spaces and clever architectural features–like thick walls and south-facing windows–contribute to energy usage per person that is 40% less than for the average American. A typical couple living in EVI pays about $500 in energy bills a year, compared to a couple in a downtown Ithaca apartment who can pay hundreds of dollars a month during the winter.

At EVI, every important decision is achieved by consensus, not majority rule. That means meetings are a fact of life, and big decisions–like the recent one to pave a central village walkway–can take as long as a year for final approval.

Now the region around EVI, which hosted the communal “Oneida perfectionists” in the second half of the 19th century, is sprouting new utopias. A new ecovillage called White Hawk, in Danby, N.Y., broke ground in January. There’s a Tibetan monastery on the outskirts of Ithaca, and a café downtown run by the Twelve Tribes, a messianic religious group. Residents of the area speak proudly of local farms run on a “community-supported agriculture” model, in which consumers purchase a share of seasonal produce from their neighborhood farm.

EVI attracts lots of visitors. On a recent weekend, they included members of a Zionist socialist organization called Hashomer Hatzair–Hebrew for “The Young Guard.” Six of the Hashomer Hatzair members have recently formed an urban commune, attempting to translate the Israeli phenomenon of the kvutzah, or urban kibbutz, to Brooklyn, N.Y. The six kvutzah-dwellers, three women and three men, aged 22 to 26, share meals and decisions–and as of six months ago, a bank account. “We want to share our money to break down some of the walls of capitalism,” says member Daniel Roth.

Not every modern communard aims to be a living example. Ed Goldstein just loves working the land–and also gets a kick from the fact that living on little means low spending and low taxes, so he doesn’t have to contribute much to what he calls “the war machine.” He moved to a 100-acre swath of woods in 1981, in the far northwestern reaches of New York State. His Ness Community is currently home to seven adults, although, over the years, many more have spent time there. Other than telephone service, the four cabins on the property aren’t connected to any public utilities. The bathrooms are outhouses, and heat comes from solar power or wood-burning stoves.

On the first day of spring, the snow still thick on the ground and the late afternoon sun shining through the trees, Goldstein checked a tap on a maple tree for sap. Warmed and drunk straight up, it tastes like sugar water. A medical doctor by training, Goldstein spends most of his time in tasks like gardening, chopping wood, preserving food, and, in the fall, hunting. “We’re not so much about sustainable technology as low technology,” he says. “We do hard labor powered by good food.” In the winter, that consists of foodstuffs that can be stored in a root cellar, like potatoes, beets, rutabagas and apple sauce.

Even this far off the grid, modern technology has transformed what it means to live in isolation. While Goldstein checked his maple tap, a resident named Vanessa chopped wood. But for income-earning work amid this rustic idyll, Vanessa translates documents for clients in Russia–using a dial-up Internet connection and powering her laptop with solar energy. Her BlackBerry’s portability lets her work the land while awaiting incoming assignments.

Ironically, the Internet is probably a driving force behind the growing popularity of communal living: Would-be brides and grooms have Match.com; would-be community members have the Fellowship for Intentional Community’s online directory. It details everything from whether a community accepts members with pre-existing debt to whether it imposes restrictions on romantic relationships between consenting adults.

You can find people who share your hobbies, dietary habits, political inclinations and religious beliefs–in short, people just like you. The existence of a diverse range of communities makes it possible to escape diversity altogether.

Some degree of homogeneity, along with strict social rules, is the key to community longevity. “In terms of a proven track record, you can’t beat the Amish,” says Anna Peterson, author of Seeds of the Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the Americas. The Anabaptist Christian sect has survived and thrived for more than a century and a half, living in small, rural communities while avoiding modern technology, medicine, banking, and government–goals shared by some of the newest intentional communities. Now, solar power, the Internet, and the UPS truck have made it possible for the rest of us to live like the Amish,too.